The Honeycut: The Haunting Atmosphere of ‘Sinister’

Murder House

I’d always heard people praise 2012’s “Sinister.” However, it’s a movie I didn’t see until last year. In fact, I saw “Sinister 2” long before the original. Horror author D.R. Kane appeared on the “Midnight Terrors Podcast” this week, and he chose to cover “Sinister.” With that, I was looking forward to revisiting this cult classic. Did I like this movie better on the second watch? Or does it not live up to the hype? 

The Story

True crime author Ellison Oswalt moves his family into a house where a family was killed years before. He is looking to write his next hit book and hopes that writing about the killings from the crime scene will help. As the film goes on, he finds snuff films in the attic, which depict the slayings of several families. From there, a series of paranormal occurrences plague Ellis and his family. 

Honey’s Cut

To start off, I like this movie. It leans more into a haunting atmosphere than jump scares, even though it has its share of those. Seeing the murder videos, which were actually shot on Super 8 film, adds a layer of realism to the movie, which enhances the feeling you’re watching some kind of cursed media. Look no further than the opening scene where we witness a family being hanged from a tree, shot on the old-school film. It’s something that won’t leave your mind anytime soon.

What I noticed on this watch, is that “Sinister” can get redundant. After the initial setup, the movie follows the formula of Ellis watches a snuff film, something supernatural happens, they try to explain it away, rinse and repeat. While this isn’t inherently a bad thing, as the paranormal stuff is well done, by the third or fourth time, it began to really stick out to me. 

Okay, let’s talk about the star of this movie, and I’m not talking about Ethan Hawke. I’m talking about the menacing entity we see glimpses of throughout: Bughuul aka Mr. Boogie. He is easily one of the coolest-looking modern monsters in horror cinema. He’s just a dude with long hair and a trench coat, but then you see his face. It’s hard to tell if he’s wearing a mask, has face paint on, or if his face is just twisted like that. It’s easy to see that when designing Mr. Boogie, the filmmakers looked to black metal bands for inspiration, with their corpse paint makeup and crazy outfits. 

Something else I like about Mr. Boogie is that he isn’t a demon, but more like a pagan deity, who entices children to murder their families. It’s a twist we don’t often see, and it would have been easy to just say he’s a demon. But the fact that mentions of him date back to the Middle Ages, as an entity that lives in images is a really neat touch. As I watched “Sinister,” I realized that Mr. Boogie reminded me of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, which is a creepy tale in its own right. Especially once you learn that 130+ children really did disappear from the village of Hamelin in the Middle Ages. 

Honey’s Final Thought

Blumhouse was on a run in the early 2010s with movies like “Insidious” and “Sinister.” These are wholly original stories that left their mark on the horror community. And for good reason, they’re downright unsettling. 

Anyway, after writing all this, I’m left wondering, what made “Sinister” hit with so many people? Was it the disturbing imagery of the murder videos? Was it the antagonist, Mr. Boogie? Or was it Ethan Hawke and the cast’s performance that left a mark on viewers? 

To me, “Sinister’s” greatest strength is the haunting atmosphere it brings. I think a lot of that has to do with restraint. This movie favors psychology over gore. A lot of the snuff film scenes just give us glimpses into what happens, without showing the full brutality. Leaving stuff like that to the imagination is often more vicious than anything you could show on screen. Same with Mr. Boogie. We see him in small doses, which adds to his mystique. In horror, where often times movies are trying to be the most extreme, it’s a breath of fresh air to see one take a step back and let the viewer’s mind do the work. 

But who knows. If I knew what made something a cult classic, I’d have written that book yesterday.